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| A piece I made in Photoshop. Just experimenting with colors and shapes. |
There was a great deal of hesitance on my part before putting fingers to keys for this post, because I didn't want to indulge in an exercise of maudlin mopery, or babble on in what could very easily be interpreted as a cry for anonymous internet affirmation (perhaps a bit presumptuous on my part to even assume anyone reads this blog; with bots and such skewing seen-by numbers these days, it's truly hard to tell if there are human eyes behind the figures at all).
My last post was just under three months ago. I feel as though I'm at an impasse. Right now I feel creatively impotent. Every-so-often I'll get a wild creative hair up my backside, and in the fervor of immediate inspiration, I'll start to passionately work on something. But whether due to a lack of skill, fuel for inspiration, or whatever the case may be, it soon peters out and I find myself with a load of unworkable dreck, which only leads to more frustration and infertility.
To put it plainly: I am feeling uninspired and more than a little stagnant. When I sit down to apply myself, I find my attention span dancing like a candle flame in a draft. I can't seem to focus. And when I do, I don't like what I produce.
I think it might be time to unplug. I find myself less a composite of personal interests, curiosity and creative fire, as I do a mass of impulse-driven schizophrenia. I need to intellectually, emotionally and spiritually detoxify. I don't mean unplug from the things I love, or from my writing exercises, I mean from the unhelpful and toxic distractions that seem to sap my drive and direction, like the useless meandering on the internet, the too-accessible distraction of my oxymoronic "smartphone", and the too-easy decision to just throw something away if it isn't creatively satisfying on my first go at it. Rather than mining my own abstraction or creative ore, I find myself rushing to imitate (poorly) something interesting that someone else has done. Perhaps to see if I could create something like that too, or perhaps because I'm afraid I can't produce something of quality on my own, using just my own skills and sensibilities.
This all sounds far too New Age-y for someone like me, but I think I need to rediscover myself. Again, this isn't a tract on down-in-the-mouth self degradation, but a treatise on cartography re: the road to happiness with myself.
More writing soon!
